Right now I’m creating a nightly restic snapshot of my server on borgbase and on some spare drives, and keeping the snapshots forever. There’s a ton of daily churn in my data though, between databases and logs and other files that don’t constitute ‘real data’ but might be needed to restore the app.
I have daily backups, weekly, monthly and yearly. All but yearly is deleted after a certain time, but yearly I keep forever.
Backups?
I was backing up multiple places on my LAN but than half of my place flooded, so lamenat and carpet was ripped up, one of my pi 5’s was misplaced with a NVMe drive and another was lost. Than just down the street 3 house went up in flames had the wind been blowing just a little south my condo complex would have been burnt to the ground. After the fire fighters were telling us to get back further and further I had my main pi 5 that had all the backups of everything important on another NVMe drive and a few other things ready to go if the firefighters started banging on my door telling me it was time to leave. I wish I could honestly say that was the day I decided to get a VPS and start my back up, but I was still hoping my father would let me set up a pi with a drive big enough to do back ups at his place. It sounds like he will but he is concerned about security risks about my VPN, funny thing is my back up pi would be the most secure thing hooked up to his modem/router and I wouldn’t want his stuff touching my stuff and with how my LAN and VPN are set up they would have a hard time doing it. Anywho I have a domain hosted by EasyDNS, and just went and looked at their VPS options and got some year long plan and set up cron jobs to take the stuff I want to backup and use age to encrypt it and than it is sent to my VPS each age container is than deleted after there is something of the same name but 3 days iterations older and deletes it.
Is using a VPS cost effective compared to uploading to object storage?
I use rclone to sync backups to Backblaze object storage. I find it hard to believe a VPS would be cheaper, considering the disk space on those can be very expensive compared to object storage.
If it was just for backup backblaze is probably less expensive but my LAN consists mostly of pi’s and hand me down computers. I am slowly moving things around on my LAN so to each their own I guess. I like the idea of having more control over my stuff so having a whole Debian system on the other end feels right for me.
*edit: It also gives me peace of mind knowing that I can encrypt my stuff to my liking. Silly me I forgot to actually look at the encryption tool I used, I just did a search and found age was highly suggested. It is coded in Go, sure it is open source and all that I am just not a fan of the language.
Ah yeah makes sense if it’s not just for storing an offsite copy of backups like mine is.
I just buy new HDDs.
Unironically how I use LTO-6 tapes.
2.5TB of storage for ~$5/tape on ebay.
Never delete anything. If the authorities ever come after me, discovery is going to be hilarious.
What’s the catch, why don’t we use those? I/O speed? Limited read/write cycles? I imagine it sucks if you need files on opposite ends of the tape.
The drives are crazy expensive if you want to use a somewhat recent generation.
The tapes are $5 but the drive was $400.
It’s linear, so you have to pull a whole backup at a time, but it is possible to store multiple unique backups on a single tape, and only pull one.
My local backup drives still have room (it’s my main pool with all bluray backups that’s begging for more space), but borgbase is approaching the point where I’ll have to bump to a higher tier or pay per gb. Looking at my usage chart every day adds at a minimum 50mb so something has to change.
I use nightly backups. I keep them 2 weeks.
After that I keep a weekly backup for 2 months.
After that I keep a monthly backup for 2 years.
I keep my yearly backups forever.
How long do you keep your backups?
Yes, I have that exernal HDD lying around somewhere near the PC, and it was at least 4 or 5 times that I backed up a lot of files on it.
I think I keep it for more than 10 years now.
For frequently changing data hourly up to 24, daily up to 7, weekly upto 4, monthly up to 12.
For daily changing data daily up to 7 and etc. as above.
For seldom changing data a backup every 3 days with rotation based on a storage quota, and retention of manually held samples.
Daily for 10 days, 4 weekly, 4 monthly.
That covers me from broken updates, generally.
came to say something like this but not sure why you would do daily for 10 days. Your doing weeklys so why not 7. I would rather increase the monthly to 7 or do 6 bi monthly and keep a yearly.
Your doing weeklys so why not 7
They are all daily backups, those schedules I pointed out are for pruning. And I don’t understand the question… How would keeping 7 instead of 10 dailies help me?
because your last weekly would be a max of 7 days out
How am I going to restore day 8, day 9, or day 10 backups if I only keep 7 days?
look im not that committed to a different scheme. Just seems to me once you get to a week and do a weekly you are good on days. heck I would do 6 daily ones and have the weekly one just be the 7th day of the week. free up yet another deep backup.
Haha OK bud
My VPS gets a weekly rsync to my home server. I keep ten deduplicated copies for weeks gone by. The current week also gets synced off-site with encryption.
[forget] keep-daily = 10 keep-weekly = 4Daily backups are cheap because of de-duplication. I keep a few weekly backups in case it takes me a bit to notice something went wrong. I don’t usually back up logs.
I could probably drop the weekly backups without much risk, but I’ve got the space.
where we’re going, we don’t need backups!
7 backups, though the frequency they’re taken (daily Vs weekly Vs monthly) depends on the service.
Why don’t you exclude logs from your backups? databases sure yes that’s where the real info is (not sure why you don’t consider it real data) but logs are useless outside of the current running instance.
I didn’t really want to poke through each containers files to figure out where it stores logs, plus it adds risk that I’m not backing up something I should.
When I say databases aren’t real data, I’m more talking about them changing every day despite nothing happening. Even if I haven’t taken any photos or opened the app, today’s db dump of immich is not the same as yesterday’s db dump so restic stores it as a new unique file.
I did mean to ask, why restic into Borg instead of just Borg?
on the logs thing that’s fair enough, most of the stuff I use has a clear “logs” folder I can exclude, and I checked what the backup contains Vs what the container data folder has before calling it a day
I’m not doing any sort of backup conversion. Borgbase is a website that focuses on hosting borg backups, but they also natively support restic. I chose restic out of convenience for my local backups because it came preinstalled on truenas and figured it made sense to use the same for my cloud backups.
I backup once a week. I have 3 backups (in 2 locations). Everytime a new one is created, the oldest is deleted. I figured if I need to roll back something, 3 weeks is more than enough to notice.
Back when I used OneDrive, it deleted an important but seldom used folder. It just wasn’t there anymore. No one noticed for 6 months, but luckily I had kept a backup each month so could restore it easily.
3 weeks is definitely not long enough for me to notice something missing, if it’s just a random chunk of my 700GB of important stuff. E.g. if a folder of my kids photos from 5 years ago suddenly disappeared, I probably wouldn’t notice it for months but would be devistated to find it missing when I eventually went looking for it.
I don’t host massive amounts of data. Just my contacts, calendars, grocery lists, rss feeds, that kind of stuff. All my pictures and movies are on my PC and backed up separately.
With borg or another deduplicating solution you could (probably) fit a year of daily in less space that the source takes. Of course depends how much the data changes over time. Highly recommend pika backup as borg desktop client. You can also easily do “smart” retention where only last week is daily, then weekly, monthly, yearly.
Zero or one backups depending on the type of data generally.
For a system if it can’t be redeployed from a list of requirements then I Foundationally ducked up. It means either I’m depending on something fragile, unknowable or over complicated.
Raw data on the other hand goes on a raid array. If I need more redundancy then that, then a single extra off site backup on a cd or something.
A back up on the same drive as the original isn’t a backup. It’s a waste of space, and a stupid idea.
A system that requires excessive nonsense is not reliable.
If I have a on and off site back up and both fail. Then either the world is literally fucking on fire and it doesn’t matter. Or someone dropped a bomb on my storage.
Either way I have bigger problems at that point.
A back up on the same drive as the original isn’t a backup. It’s a waste of space, and a stupid idea.
It’s a backup that helps against software errors, but not against drive failures. Depending on what you want to achieve, it’s a perfectly valid strategy.
Still don’t consider it a proper back up personally.
It’s just not a good long term solution. A short term backup for redundancy while actively working on something sure. Just keep it local.
But as a real actual backup? No, local doesn’t cut it.
I know I’ll get shot for this, but I stopped backing up a long time ago.
I was doing it at home because I do it at work and it’s the done thing. But when I stopped to think about it, I realised I don’t have anything at home that actually matters. If I lose my Plex library it’s ok.
Other than my password manager database, the rest of my backups are not overly valuable. I don’t really need my 2016 factorio saves, but I have them. Adding more things to backup is minimal effort so I do, but if the space taken up becomes a concern there is plenty I could trim from it.
